Kara Vernor

If You’re a Girl and You’re Going to Have Sex with Another Girl, But You’re on Your Period and You’re Wearing a Tampon, Can You Still? Do People Ever Do That?

It’s like getting a ride home from sports practice with a guy who happens to be walking through the rec center parking lot right when your team is excused. This guy, we’ll call him Eddie, he’s old enough to drive and probably to vote, and his pick-up truck runs despite leaking oil. He could give you a ride except you don’t know him and you’re a girl, so should is the question in question, should you ride home with him? He’s offering. But there’s also could, like if Eddie were old enough to drink, he might be drunk-walking the lot because he spent the afternoon at the Watering Hole watching baseball with friends who ordered pitchers of Miller and Michelob and other goodtime beers that make people with white teeth act bonkers and surprise their lady friends by tackling them in the sand or throwing them over their shoulders. In this case shouldn’t is obvious and not the question. Instead we are interested in could. If you ride with Eddie, could he drive home drunk without getting stopped by a perfectly still pole or sycamore trunk or brick wall that would prevent arrival? Could he make it given the beer he drank and the women he shouldered? You could take out your tampon of course, you could remove all obstacles, but you’re a girl and you want to have sex with another girl without leaking. So both should and could are the question. Should you proceed with impediments that could obstruct your goodtime? Is it even done?

Kara Vernor’s fiction has appeared in Wigleaf, No Tokens, PANK, The Los Angeles Review, and elsewhere. She is an Elizabeth George Foundation Scholar at the Northwest Institute for Literary Arts and was a 2015 Best Small Fictions finalist. Her chapbook, Because I Wanted to Write You a Pop Song, will be available in June from Split Lip Press, and she is currently at work on a series of shorts inspired by questions asked in middle school sex ed classes.

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